Open Wide

Your heart, I mean. OPEN YOUR HEART, YOU WEIRDO

I’m a sucker for card decks. When I was younger, I collected playing cards. These days, I seem to be quickly amassing a tarot card collection. The interpretive element to the cards gives the decks a coherence, range, and depth of meaning that playing card decks lack. It gives them more personality and lets me tickle my historian fancy by thinking about the ways that knowledge gets borrowed, adapted, stolen, learned, incorporated, changed, and rejected as different people and different traditions interact.

Today’s deck initially drew my eye for its minimalist artwork and juxtaposition of black and white with focused, strong colors, but it’s held my interest for the ways that it incorporates an eclectic hodgepodge of different magical practices and narrows them down into an extremely focused interpretive point. The Naked Heard Tarot uses crystals, animal familiars, shadow work, tarot, and sacred geometry to focus specifically on getting your heart right as the first step towards manifesting your goals. I have yet to decide what I think about this particular point to the deck. On the one hand, there’s an awful lot of people out there who get so caught up in self-work that they fail to do any urgently needed work outside of themselves, but on the other, there’s also an awful lot of people doing the urgent work who could seriously stand to stop fucking it up by doing a little self-work first. Either way, I unabashedly love the individuality of the deck.